Five Tips For Pest Management In Your Organic Garden

In the ideal world, when you plant your bean seeds and tomato seedlings as you start your garden, the soil is so healthy that pests want nothing to do with your crops. But the fact is, despite your best efforts, pests will show up. Which ones and how many will depend on such things as the nutrient-richness of the soil and the climate.

Regardless of which critters decide to bug you any given year, the following oranic vegetable gardening tips will help you to reduce the amount of pests and ensuing crop loss.

1. Grow seedlings as large as you can before setting them out. Otherwise fela beetles and other hungry pests can deovour an entire plant overnight.
2. Grow extra plants. If you have more than enough, losing a few plants to insects isn’t as biga disappointment as it would have been otherwise.
3. Buy and release parasitic wasps and beneifical nematodes early in the season (especially your first two or three years). They will eat the larvae of many garden pests.
4. Se row covers for shorter plants. Row covers will keep cabbage moths from laying eggs on your Brassicas (kale, broccoli, cabbage, etc.) and grasshoppers from munching on bean leaves.
5. Sprinke diatomaceous earth over the soil around the plants. This deceptively powedery subastance kills dirt-dwelling creatures, such as pill and sow bugs, and slugs and snails. This will also discourage aphids, and prevent ants from climbing up plnats to help the aphids multiply.
6. Continue to enrich your soil with compost and/or composted manure and/or mulch.
7. Check your garden for pests and pest damage daily. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

These vegetable gardening tips have saved my sanity; put them to use in your garden and they will save yours, too!